One Year

Yesterday was my little girls 1st Birthday and it really got me thinking about the time leading up to her arrival and how much has changed in the last year.
I'll start with a little back story. Adam and I got married (yay) and we planned to have children right away, but until then I'd work. Well, weeks turned into months and months into years, we found out we were suffering with "unexplained infertility." What a FUN thing and it was extremely taxing on our relationship. Most never saw that we were suffering, we worked hard to keep private matters that way. We let people know we were having trouble having a child, but never that the struggle really was hurting us. By the time we actually got pregnant we were first shocked and second scarred because we weren't sure about ourselves as a family. We struggled for the first few hormonal months but things started to work.
Then Grace came into our life. What a wonderful day! To be honest I never thought that was the day she was coming. All day I'd had very very mild contractions, I put them off as braxton hicks as I'd had a few before and they were no where close to regular. Then suddenly my water broke, but barely... no gush like all the movies, and hour later the "real" contractions started. Shortly after that Adam arrived home and we went to the hospital. Long story short we arrived at 7:20 and had a baby in our arms by 10:01. I managed to only really labor for 5 hours! Much to my relief I also managed to go all naturally like I'd hoped (although I did beg my husband at one point for relief, he was so sweet and encouraged me to go just a little longer).
Now, we brought Grace home, what a scary time. Learning to be a mom, breastfeed, never sleep, change a million diapers, clean a house, make food, and do laundry took a while to get the hang of. Poor Adam even said he missed how I used to make dinner, as he was making it when he got home for a while. Needless to say I was tired for several months.
Grace has since hit many milestones and I'm so excited with everything she learns every day. My little one year old has only two little front teeth, walks, crawls on occasion, gets into EVERYTHING, and is generally an amazing little girl that I wouldn't change for the world.